When "Dateline" on-air correspondent Edie Magnus and attorney and women's rights advocate Wendy Murphy spoke last night in the ExCollege's "Producing Films for Social Change" class, the provocative and well-known female speakers provided some sharp commentary on the challenges of effecting social change through the news industry.
Magnus said that she was under no delusions that "news could ... effect any social change at all" due to competitive pressure on the airways.
She asked students which shows they thought presented the primary competition to "Dateline," which airs on NBC at 9 p.m. on Fridays.
Responses included "Frontline," "60 Minutes" and "20/20."
Yet according to Magnus, news programming must compete for airtime not just with its news-genre peers, but also with entertainment programming.
She said that effecting social change becomes difficult when your job is to "come up with shows that will turn you away from ... 'Forensic Files' [and] 'Lost.'"
Covering public interest stories is "as close as I get to social activism," Magnus said.
Magnus told students the story of a New York Giants fan who drove home from a game drunk and crashed into an oncoming car, paralyzing a two-year-old who was inside. After the man was criminally convicted, the girl's family sued both him and Aramark, the concession company that had sold him alcohol at the game.
The family sued Aramark on the grounds that its employees had violated Aramark's alcohol sales policies. For example, the man claimed that he had been sold six beers at once, while Aramark's policy states that a person may be sold no more than two beers at a given time.
The family won both suits and a total of $135 million in "the largest alcohol liability ruling in history," Magnus said. "We thought 'OK, let's see if it made a difference.'"
Magnus showed the class a 16-minute clip in which "Dateline" sent cameras undercover to Major League Baseball stadiums to find out if the alcohol situation had changed.
The report indicated that Aramark had tightened up its policies on alcohol sales, but a rival company, Sports Services, had not. The segment also featured interviews with the girl's family, the companies' officials and the man who drove drunk.
Magnus told the class that after the piece appeared on "Dateline," tailgating was banned for the first time at a Harvard-Yale football game.
The group then discussed the clip, considering both alcohol use at stadiums and the journalistic techniques of the piece itself.
Variations in storytelling techniques were of interest to students, and Magnus said that both editorial decisions and aesthetic decisions must be made when producing a 'news magazine' piece such as this one. The editorial decisions involve making sure the story treats all sides fairly, while the aesthetic decisions involve making the storyline attractive to viewers.
Murphy, who said she wanted students to learn "how to be critical consumers of the information [they] are getting in the name of news", jokingly described herself as an activist, not a journalist.
"Cynicism is a helpful characteristic," she said.
According to Murphy, although journalism's role, ideally, is to transcend politics, it often ends up working as "part of the machine."
"My particular beef with journalism [is that] it indulges, more often than not, the very thing it professes to be rising above," Murphy said, citing the example of how journalists present the inner workings of a court room - an issue with which she is familiar.
"What happens in a courtroom is not designed to elucidate the truth," she said. "It's about winning." Hence, problems arise if the media reports a court case as if all statements made were factual.
Murphy discussed specific examples, including the case in which Kobe Bryant was accused of rape by a 19-year-old female hotel employee, whose name was withheld by the press. In that case, after four dead sperm from an unknown individual were found in the woman's underwear, Bryant's defense attorney publicly suggested that such evidence would be consistent with a woman who had sex with three men in three days.
The attorney's statement portrayed the woman as promiscuous. In actuality, the evidence showed that the sperm had been long dead. But the media ran with the headline of the sperm found in the underwear, Murphy said, implying that the woman was promiscuous and disregarding the facts of the case.
Murphy then brought up "Rathergate," the debacle that occurred when Dan Rather presented unverified documents critical of George W. Bush's military service on CBS.
She said that while Rathergate caused people to lose their jobs, nobody went out of work over the "terrible journalism" of the Bryant case.
"Nobody even talks about it," she said.
